Summer of Rage: Rabies Surge in Some States Might Be Due to Heat

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Summer of Rage: Rabies Surge in Some States Might Be Due to Heat

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This summer, some sensational encounters between rabid wildlife and people have been making headlines across the country.

In May, a group of Arizona campers was surprised to have its campsite invaded by a rabid mountain lion. When the lion attacked one camper’s dog, a 90-pound Laborador mix named Apollo, its owner grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the fire and smashed the rabid lion over the head until it was dead.

When a fox snatched her small dog, Vinny, at the beginning of this month, a Florida teenager chased the fox down and attempted to choke it, then slammed its head against a pole. When it continued to bite the dog, the girl got a knife from her kitchen and stabbed the animal twice. Thinking she had succeeded in killing the fox, she stood up, only to have the fox rear up and attack her. The police who arrived on the scene shortly thereafter had to shoot the fox in self-defense.

While letting her terrier outside one early morning, a western Maryland woman found herself nose to nose with a rabid deer. The deer proceeded to stand up on its hind legs and box the woman about her head and shoulders with its forelimbs, before retreating under the woman’s Toyota Corolla.

Two sisters, aged 8 and 11, were viciously bitten on the legs by a rabid beaver two days into their week-long family vacation in Virginia. Their uncle subdued the 65-pound rodent by first shooting it with a BB gun and then stabbing it with a hunting knife.

Is rabies on the rise this summer? Raw surveillance data always needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but the answer seems to be yes. Many U.S. states – particularly in Texas and the Great Plains, but also in such far-flung locales as New Mexico, Colorado, Arkansas, and Maine – are reporting larger-than-usual numbers of wild animals testing positive for rabies.

It’s possible that these increases might be due to improved surveillance, or to a cyclical pattern of rabies infection rates in certain species of animals. But health officials also point to 2012’s particularly mild winter. Higher-than-average temperatures likely led common rabies vectors like raccoons and skunks, normally dormant during the cold months, to become more active — which would thereby increase the opportunity for contact between infected and uninfected animals, both within and among species.

Dr. Charles Rupprecht, chief of the rabies program at the CDC, notes that higher temperatures might also mean more wild animals in general. “With a milder winter, and an earlier and a warmer spring, maybe we had greater survivorship in some other carnivore populations.” More animals overall means more potentially infected animals, leading to an increase in overall rabies incidence.

Our two-year drought might be playing a role as well. Rupprecht notes that in the bone-dry central United States, where animals are forced to congregate at fewer and fewer available water sources, the uptick in rabid wildlife is even more pronounced.

So: Is this the beginning of the zombie wildlife apocalypse?

Probably not. “Every year we have oddball cases,” says Rupprecht. “You’ve got multiple things going on: some of which are normal, some of which are cyclical, some of which are climate, and some of which are periodically weather-driven.” Long term-disease surveillance will eventually help scientists and public health officials sort out which is which.

In the meantime, watch out for demon critters, and try not to get bit.